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Notes -
I am aware of such cases. In one case because people cared, were willing to take being late or risking beating or prison sentence or being thrown out of work and take minor risk of being assassinated by regime - but they were not aware that such opinion was widely shared.
So protests sparked strikes and so on.
Note that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_warning_strike_in_Poland basically failed - despite 12 million people participating in strike - in country that had 36 million people! Imagine 111 million people on strike in USA! Strike included regime television, all TV went out for 4 hours.
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Polish_strikes were final trigger for regime change.
On other side: for minor issues even minor protest can cause results, especially for local government issues when noone really opposes them. Or opposing group will happily go away and try to take less defended victim rather than fight this specific battle. In sufficiently minor cases things as simple as single person mailing local government can work.
Other model: it is demonstration of power and one step away from armed mob/uprising/terrorism. This also sometimes works. Sometimes by progressing into outright revolution.
See Ukraine in 2014 (president run away, no full scale civil war*) or how Tzarist Russia ended (ended in a full scale civil war).
*or ended in a civil war if you treat what happened in East as civil war rather than Russian invasion.
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